I know, this is an old thread, but fun. Vic-20 was my friend for a while. Then the Amiga, with lots of hardware sprinkled in between at various jobs in the military.
I couldn't afford the Commodore recorder, either, so I used a cheap cassette recorder from RadioShack and wired it up, always having to play around with the volume levels to get it to record and play back correctly.
I even made a light pen from the Compute magazine stuff. It worked poorly, but was at the beginning of a career in instrumentation and testing.....

It's not the hardware or the software, but what you can DO with it that counts.

people tend to be hard-working if they got nothing better to do ...

anyway ... its msdos on a pc with very long printing paper ...

i was editing/re-editing table of contents(with short descriptions of intended purposes) of books on floppies and i can still remember at times , my younger sister was having her english tuition in the next room , her teacher commented that her elder brother could at times get pretty violent when dealing with computers ...


//btw ... nice thread anyway ...


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I don't know, but it was a big polished steel box inside a big warship.

As for PC stuff MS DOS 5 on a 286x12Mhz\640Kbmem\cga\24pin dotmatrix. Then, some expert told me how inadequate that machine was. HAH!
Found an 8bit card, had 4meg of memory, dropped that in an 8 bit ISA slot, threw out the 5.25\ 1.2MB foppy, fitted a whopping big 30 Mb winchester hard drive and card, and a 16 bit ISA VGA card. Installed DOS 6.22, and floated Win 3, and Works over that. That rig got me through tertiary studies in Environmental Engineering.
First Linux, Caldera non commercial, on a 486dx4100\32MB\VLB graphics, and a massive 1.2GB of drive space, over 3 hard disks on a VLB 4MB caching controller card.
Ah! The good old days of test, crash, rebuild, crash again.

Heh, alred, violent? with computers? never. When was the last time you saw me run over a computer with a bus? I don't think I have ever seen you shoot a computer with a shotgun! Violent? Never. Frustrated? YES. But never violent. Not in our nature.

Shorty943.

registered Linux user 437639.

something you dont always need to do anything(anything at all) in violence ... your type of violence is unthinkable actually ...

ok , i was actually refering to times when i was trying/experimenting(??) replacing my fountain pen with something softer and intangible ... probably because of the failure of fountain pens and papers that i chosen "softwares" ...

but they are worser failures ...


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Apple IIe was the first machine I ever used. After that I used an IBM clone from Kpro running who-knows-what version of DOS. It was a 80286 machine.

MS-DOS was what my parent's computer had on it, and then win3.1
I guess back then I didn't have much of a choice, nor did I know of any other OS; had no internet connection and IT education only began in my country 3 years ago :-\
Portugal is quite retarded when it comes to IT / computers, so i'm lucky I even had one when I was young....

Some of us weren't rich enough to afford a fancy/shmancy TI 99-4A...

(And we walked to school uphill both ways too! BAREFOOT! IN WINTER! )

well the first computes i rember being at school were BBC micros (not sure which ones) with monochrome screens and 5.25" floppys
[lol]i remember when you used to eject the foloppy it shot half way across the room [/lol]

but we diddnt really use them much

next we had "RM nimbus" boxes (i think that they had a 286 or 386 under the hood but im not too sure)

thease had 3.5" floppys!!!

i still remember the boot sequence.....

[blue screen]
RM nimbus, welcome
please wait....

[next screen]
looking for an operating system
please wait......

[another blue screen]
please supply an operating system...

at this point you slapped in the disk with whaterver you wanted to run
eg Caxton (word processor)
or PaintSquirt (paint program) (the screens were 16 colour!)

and hopefully it would work...

i was also a computer monitor then, which basicly entailed running round with the box of serial mice before the lesson (if we needed them (for PaintSquirt)) plugging them all in, and reseting tghe computors with the 3 finger salute if they froze.

we still had those computers at school till 1998 allong with one RS nimbus window box (win 3.1 )added later

it was about 1994 when i got my first home computer,
which was an I486 with 4M RAM and a 800MB Hdd running win 3.1 (though half teh time i exited windows and used dos programs, this was my first encounter with teh command line...)
(we later upgraded it to add a 1X CD-ROM and a sound card)

in the year before i left junior school ( that would be 7th grade in USA terms i think (year 6 here in the UK) )
they bought a line of win 98 (First edition) machines.

at secondry school we had 2 computer rooms of win 95 machines that i belive were some kind of slim client, as when the server went down the whole job was screwed

at home by then i got a win 98 se computer (with USB!!!!) intel celleron 400MHz 32M Ram and a 4Gb hdd with a 50X cd rom
i stil have this box to today but i downgraded teh HDD to 1.6GB and its now my firewall (running IPcop)


in 2000 my dad got a win ME (wase of space) comp with a celeron 800Mhz 64M ram and 20G hdd


my secondry school replaced the computers with win xp in 2002? (big jump from 95)
and strted teaching us to be office monkeys (word excell etc. ) that was so boring as i was allready preatty much fluent in it!)
we did one module in web page creation using MS font page
(which genereted miles of c**p for teh most simple pages taht my classmates made (with WYSIWYG)
i wrote the module in pure HTML and had 2 pages of code for the same web page..... so much for WYSIWYG

later i inherited the win me machine my dad had but this was a real mess (as win ME tended to become after a few months)
this was when i started tinkering with linux.

i started by getting linux for dummies from the libary and instaling Red hat 7 (form the cover CD)

this proved to be way out of date. so i loked for a newer version, finding that you had to pay for redhat now , i tried slackware (10.1) (which i had heard of from a mate)
this sort of worked but i had major X11 trouble, it was frm teh slackware website that i blundered into this site (the slackware forum here is the offical slackware board!)

somone recomended Suse to me and i installed 10.0 and was quite happy for a long time.
i upgraded to 10.1 and liked it once i had fixed the stupid Yast bug (by replaceing it with smart)

my computer getting gradully older got less able to handle suse (even with a ram upgrade to 256M)
and when novell sold their soul to MS it was the last straw so i swiched to Fedora Core 6


last week my brand new comp arrived (in kit form lol, i dont think i will ever buy another prebuilt unless its a laptop) with its AMD X2 processor... w00000t
unfortunatly the HDD was DOA so i awaiting a replacement (and running knoppix in the meantime!)


now at work we have some of the oldest machines i have ever used! (not my desk pc thankfully, that is a winXP P4 (would have prefered RHEL or more likley SLED as we have a novell server here))

we have a few sun (SparcStation 2)running solaris 2.6 (system V)
unix machines.... which have never been swiched off in about 5 years to my knowlege!

Sinclair Spectrum, Vic 20 followed by a Sinclair QL ( What no one else ) Amiga, Atari and then on to the rubbish PC.
I still have my QL's ome with 20 MB MFM hard disks

The first computer I ever saw (close up) was an Apple II, but the first one I ever used was a Research Machines 380Z, at the secondary school I attended. You had to boot into BASIC from a 5.25in floppy disk (and the first one of these I bought cost £5 - more than 10 times the present price). Then the school got four(!) BBC micros, but I was true to my first love. I remember being introduced to text-based adventures on this machine.

The first computer I owned was a ZX81, and then I progressed to a 48K Spectrum. I did a bit of programming (BASIC and Forth), and a lot of game-playing - classics such as Elite, Sabre Wulf and The Hobbit, loaded from cassette. I've regretted parting with these machines for years.

Has anyone else browsed Digital Retro? A wonderful book about these computers, and the ones I salivated over in Personal Computer World. I remember being in awe of a Sharp machine which had a staggering 128KB of RAM and 2 floppy disks, and cost £750 (just slightly more than Dell would charge me today for a Core Duo system with 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard disk...)

Happy days!
Rob

Not including the weird Texas Instruments "thing" I had when I was about three, my first computer was a Commodore VIC 20, and I had a 64 and about three Amigas. Back then, a gig was inconceivable, I remember when I was at high school, and my friends would come in and say, "I got a new PC, it has a 2GB hard drive." Everyone was like, WOW! 2 GIGs, eff me!

I just can't wait to see how much they have advanced in about 60 years or so. But we probably won't be around by then as computers will have become self-sufficient and run the planet alone. We will be rendered obsolete. We will be the Amigas, and the VIC 20s of the future.

Oh well

Hi,

Why nobody with CP/M?

Prepenguin era, Apple, CP/M, MS/DOS, (not SB/DOS age) and 8080 monitor (it was a kit, on 512Byte EE-PROM main memory was 2-4 kilobytes, no CRT monitor, only 8 8segment LEDs, 25 keys),

HARP5020 on Hitachi5020 (IBM 380? clone), VAX and Idris on PDP-11/23, HP-UX and Solaris: these are NOT persnoal computer.

Happy Penguins, Apples, Altairs, Ataris, Tandys, Commodores, PETS..

Dos of some version really don't remember. I remember dialing my local BBS on the blazing fast 960 baud modem. It was a blast to use my rotary phone and dial the BBS and hang the receiver on the modem and listen to the beeps and duuuu-beefs that were all part of being online back then. And the old BBS games....They were a blast! And the little green cursor just waiting for you to type something...Man it was great...Go buy a mag and type the program in as it said and you my friend had a game. WOW computers have sure improved!

First owned was a second-hand Sinclair ZX Spectrum
First used was an Apple IIc